GARNET-E: “GMES and Africa: Regional Network for Information Exchange and Training in Emergencies”.

Project Objective:

Considering the overall objective of networking between information providers, user networks and centres of excellence in European and African countries, the concept is to coordinate particular GMES Emergency Response Core Service activities in an African context, leading to the provision of recommendations and support to the European Commission, in their preparation of an Action Plan for GMES and Africa, for endorsement at the next EU-Africa Summit, in 2010.

The concept of GARNET-E is to construct “needs-driven” activities. These activities must be an inherent and coherent part of a joint strategy with other GMES and Africa initiatives. They should not be just “for”, but “with” Africa and with due respect for African ownership.

It is aimed to address precisely the three policy areas set out in Section 1 of the FP7 Space Call, namely:

• Sustainable Development, (through information gathering in support of the actions resulting from the Johannesburg Summit on sustainable development, taking into account the “Lisbon Declaration on GMES and Africa”);
• the Common Foreign and Security Policy (specifically in support of crisis management); and
• the Lisbon Strategy (through better opportunities for space-related industries and geo-information services, including improved access to GMES).

At the highest level, the overarching objective of GARNET-E is:

To contribute to the partial re-alignment of the “GMES Emergency Response in Africa” agenda, from  technical activities focussed purely on risk and poverty reduction and response using European capacities, to those more directed to building sustainable local capacities, leading to real wealth creation in Africa.

This will be achieved through the two sub-objectives:

(i) To enable the integration of African requirements in the definition of future operation of the Emergency Response Core Service in Africa; and
(ii) To encourage the strengthening and building of regional and local capabilities, to allow African users and policy makers to access the EO-derived information provided by the Emergency Response Core Service.
Further technical sub-objectives flowing from these are:
(iii) To exchange information, mainly through training exercises, on the operation of the GMES Emergency Response Core Service and the International Charter Space and Major Disasters; and
(iv)  To improve the quality and efficacy of the GMES Emergency Response Core Service itself, through consideration of requirements gathering exercises and the ingestion of in situ data.

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